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What happens to the unidentified dead?

The identities of hundreds of people who have died in Ontario since the '60s remain a mystery. What happens to their bodies?

The Toronto morgue has partial remains dating back to the 1960s — not all bodies are found intact, and in other cases, parts of a body may be buried while others are kept for further testing. (Marcus Oleniuk / Toronto Star)

He might have been 42. He might have lived in a makeshift camp set up by the train tracks where the fatal encounter happened.

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The Special Investigations Unit released three photos of him, “provided by agencies and organizations he had contact with in the past,” but still, his true identity remains murky.

Dead and without a name. But not alone.

This John Doe is one among hundreds of people who have died in the province since the 1960s whose identities remain a mystery.

According to a database of missing people and unidentified remains compiled by the Ontario Provincial Police, authorities are still trying to identify at least 371 John and Jane Does who were found dead between 1964 and 2015 . Fifty of those people were found in Toronto; all but two were male.

But how does one get that classification? And what happens after that?

When a body is found, the coroner and police work together to pin down a name, said Cheryl Mahyr, a spokesperson for the Office of the Chief Coroner and Ontario Forensic Pathology Service. While the coroner works the scientific side — fingerprints, dental records, DNA, among other things — police try to find people who may know the deceased.

Sometimes, those efforts don’t produce any concrete answers.

In the past, the coroner would release remains from a morgue once forensic testing was complete, but that’s gradually changing. Mahyr said in an email that science “is changing at a rapid pace and sometimes it is determined that it may be beneficial to keep remains on site as opposed to interring them.”

For example, recent advancements in DNA technology have opened up new avenues for identifying remains; keeping remains in storage in anticipation of new identification methods can be better than burying them and then digging them up for testing in the future.

“It is not desirable to exhume coffins and disturb remains that have been respectfully interred,” Mahyr said.

The Toronto morgue has partial remains dating back to the 1960s — not all bodies are found intact, and in other cases, parts of a body may be buried while others are kept for further testing. The oldest intact body has been at the morgue since 2009. There’s no “typical” time for how long remains might stay at the morgue, Mahyr said, because the circumstances surrounding each person’s death, and the subsequent investigations, are unique.

When unidentified remains are released, it becomes the responsibility of the municipality in which they were found to bury them.

In Toronto, the work is carried out by the city’s Employment and Social Services (TESS) department. Each burial costs slightly over $3,000, including funeral home services and opening and closing the plot, and the cost is funded by the Ontario Works program. The graves are marked with a numbered marker which is recorded by the cemetery. TESS could not provide data on how many unidentified bodies are buried by the city every year.

Mayhr declined to comment on whether the John Doe shot by police in June is still at the morgue, or on any other case in 2016 because “their status is fluid and can change very quickly;” a body listed as unidentified one week could be identified the next, she explained.

Fourteen people have been identified in the past three years, Mahyr added. However, even having a name isn’t always the end of the line — hundreds of deceased with known identities fall into the classification of “unclaimed.”

Under Ontario’s Anatomy Act, a body is considered “unclaimed” if no friends or family come forward within 24 hours of death and if it will not be used for tissue and organ donations. Like unidentified remains, they eventually become the responsibility of the municipality to bury.

A total of 281 bodies went unclaimed in 2014, according to an annual report published by the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario, that year being the most recent one that the report is available for. Of those, 150 were buried in Toronto.

And so, even if matched with his real name, the John Doe killed in June may still be laid to rest alone.

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